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sexta-feira, 1 de novembro de 2013

Appearing on The Ellen
DeGeneres Show in 2005 to promote her new film Prime, Meryl Streep—famous for her Oscar-caliber performances in
wrenching motion pictures like The
Deer Hunter, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Sophie’s Choice—gave the audience a taste of the raucous sense
of humor that had largely, before then, been hidden under the bushel of her
“serious actress” reputation.

She joked with Ellen that they were acquaintances only because they kept
running into each other at the bar before Hollywood events. She played along in
a giddy game of name that foreign accent (Streep killed). She really got the
audience going with her account of the Prime casting process: “They
pitched it and said, ‘You know, it’s the story of an older woman and a younger
man.’ And I thought, Ah, that might be fun! And then realized that the
‘older woman’ was Uma [Thurman] . . . and I was the older . . . older
woman.” (Cue sympathetic groans from the mostly female studio audience....

At the time, Streep, then
56, seemed resignedly headed down the familiar road of actresses of a certain
age who end up playing genteel grannies or crazed, knife-wielding crones. But
by 2009, Streep had miraculously pulled off the near-impossible: ranked third
on Forbes’s list of the industry’s top-earning actresses, behind Angelina Jolie
(then age 34) and Jennifer Aniston (40). After starring in the sexy comedy It’s
Complicated opposite Alec Baldwin—nine years her junior—she was feted on
the cover of Vanity Fair. “I’m 60, and I’m playing the romantic lead!”
she crowed. “Bette Davis is rolling over in her grave!”[2]

Hollywood’s new box-office
queen “broke the glass ceiling of an older woman being a big star,” the
director Mike Nichols marvelled. “It has never, never happened before.”[3] So how
did Streep do it? It had a lot to do with that unexpected sense of humor—and a
gale-force charisma that only gets richer with age. Three seriously funny
scripts by, about, and for women—older women—put her on top of movieland’s
commercial heap.

First came the
silver-haired, impeccably accoutred Miranda Priestly, the editor of Runway,
the world’s most powerful fashion magazine, in The Devil Wears Prada.
The script was based on Lauren Weisberger’s best-selling roman à clef of the
same title, which Streep found naïve, “written out of anger.”[4] She
decided in researching the Miranda Priestly character that it was “much more
fun to make the überboss out of my own pastiche of experience.”[5] It
became Streep’s highest-grossing film to date.

Next came Mamma Mia!
That one earned half a billion dollars worldwide. She followed it up
delightfully with her title role as the cookbook auteur Julia Child in Nora
Ephron’s hit Julie & Julia.

“Streep’s success,” Vanity
Fair observed, “forced Hollywood to consider a startling hypothesis: If you
make movies that actually interest women, they will buy tickets to see them.”[6]

More startling to
Streep—whose sensibility was formed in the consciousness-raising feminist era
at the all-women’s Vassar College of the sixties—is that these movies about
older women also appeal to men. In a commencement address at Barnard College,
she told graduates that men of her age often approach her to express empathy
for characters like Miranda Priestley: “They can relate to her issues, the high
standards she sets for herself and others, the thanklessness of the leadership
position. . . .”[7] Men
learning to sympathize with a female character is, to Streep, “a huge deal,”[8] much
more than just the secret to higher box-office receipts.

Although Streep has been
transformed from merely being the greatest actor of her generation into being,
well, a movie star, she remains above the typical (and sometimes tawdry)
Hollywood fray. Married to the sculptor Donald Gummer—raising a family of four
children, a dog, two cats, and three fish in their Connecticut home—she has
kept her private life private. In a Vogue interview, Jack Nicholson, a
sometime costar, once likened her to the Mona Lisa: “There’s this tremendous
part of Meryl that I don’t know that anybody has ever seen. It’s that old Gioconda smile, the
mystery of her.”[9]

Streep posed for her first Vogue
cover at 62, as rumors swirled, yet again, that she was in contention, yet
again, for another Oscar (this time, for playing Margaret Thatcher in The
Iron Lady). Her star shows no sign of burning out. Streep is of an
age when she will also be receiving more lifetime achievement awards—for
example, as a 2011 Kennedy Center honoree for her “lifetime contribution to
American culture.” But, as she shared with Barnard’s graduates, “awards have
very little bearing on my own personal happiness. . . . That comes from
studying the world feelingly, with empathy in my work. Being a celebrity has
taught me to hide, but being an actor has opened my soul.”[10]

HISTORY

1. 1949

Mary Louise Streep born in Summit, New Jersey, to Mary Wolfe Streep, a
home-based commercial artist, and Harry William Streep, Jr., head of personnel
at Merck & Co. pharmaceutical company. Raised Presbyterian in
Bernardsville, with younger brothers Dana and Harry, she will have her name
shortened by her mother to the nickname “Meryl.” She later will describe her
father as “very academic and very bright.” As for her mother: “You wanna know
what my mother was like? Look at Ladies in Lavender. I almost couldn’t
watch it, because Judi Dench looked exactly like my mother.”[11]

2. 1955

At six, makes her “first conscious attempt at acting,” placing her
mother’s half-slip over her head to play the Virgin Mary in the living room, a
scene captured by dad on Super 8. “As I swaddled my Betsy Wetsy doll I felt
quieted, holy, actually,” she later recalls, “my transfigured face and very
changed demeanor” drew in younger brothers Harry to play Joseph, and Dana, a
barnyard animal. “They were actually pulled into this nativity scene by the
intensity of my focus. . . . I learned something on that day.”[12]

3. 1958

The nine-year-old nascent actress takes eyebrow pencil and carefully
draws lines all over her face to replicate the wrinkles she had memorized from
her adored grandmother’s face, and makes her mother take a picture.

4. 1960

Around this time her mother
enrolls her in opera-singing lessons with renowned coach Estelle Liebling.
Streep’s unexpected ability to carry a tune will be heard in 1983’s Silkwood,
1986’s Heartburn, 1987’s Ironweed, 1990’s Postcards from the
Edge, 1992’s Death Becomes Her, 2006’s A Prairie Home Companion,
and 2008’s box-office smash and Grammy-nominated Mamma Mia!

5. 1964

Attends Bernards High
School, shedding braces, glasses, and darker hair. “I wanted to learn how to be
appealing,” she later says. “So I studied the character I imagined I wanted to
be. I researched her deeply, that is to say shallowly, in Vogue, Seventeen,
and Mademoiselle.” She peroxides her hair, irons it straight, and also
works on “lightening” her giggle: “This was all about appealing to boys and at
the same time being accepted by the girls, a very tricky negotiation.”[13] She
makes varsity cheerleader, stars in all the school musicals, and ultimately is
crowned homecoming queen. Her yearbook reads “pretty . . . vivacious . . . many
talents . . . where the boys are.”[14] (“My
favorite part of high school was the boys who sat in the back row,” she will
tell Ms. in 1979. “They were so funny! So much of what I know about
comedy—even the most sophisticated comedy—comes from high school, because it’s
such a painful, funny time.”[15]) She
also takes lessons in acting, which, along with her ambition to be a U.N.
interpreter, becomes a dominant interest.

6. 1968

Enrolls at Vassar. “Outside
of any competition for boys, my brain woke up,” she later says. “I found myself
again. I didn’t have to pretend, I could be goofy, vehement, aggressive, and
slovenly and open and funny and tough and my friends let me. I didn’t wash my
hair for three weeks once.”[16] As she
will tell Vassar students in a 1983 commencement speech, “What everybody says
is absolutely true—these are the halcyon days. Real life is actually a lot more
like high school. . . . Looks count. A lot.”[17]

7. 1969

Begins to seriously pursue
acting at Vassar, making a brilliant theater debut (in her drama professor’s
opinion) in the Strindberg classic Miss Julie. He will later remember
her college performances as consistently “hair-raising, absolutely
mind-boggling. I don’t think anyone ever taught Meryl acting; she really taught
herself.”[18]

8. 1972

After earning an acting
degree from Vassar, heads to the prestigious Yale School of Drama for three years,
where she will appear in more than 40 productions, be nicknamed “Yale’s Leading
Lady,” and develop an ulcer from feeling so nervous and pressured by the
intensely competitive atmosphere.

9. 1975

Goes directly from Yale to
the New York stage, making her Broadway debut in Trelawny of the ‘Wells,’
as part of Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival.

10. 1976

Appears in Henry V.
Earns a Tony award nomination for Tennessee Williams’s 27 Wagons Full of
Cotton. During rehearsals for Measure for Measure, introduced to—and
falls in love with—actor John Cazale; he tells Al Pacino, “I’ve met the
greatest actress in the history of the world.”[19]

11. 1977

Eases into television with The
Deadliest Season—in which she plays the wife of a hockey player accused of
manslaughter—and into movies, making her screen debut in a pivotal flashback
scene in Julia. Cast, along with fiancé John Cazale, in The Deer
Hunter. “I was ecstatic to be in it because I was living with John at the
time and we could be in it together.”[20]

12. 1978

Spends much of her time at
the bedside of seriously ill Cazale, who is diagnosed with bone cancer. March:
Cazale dies. Grieving, Streep dives back into work, playing Alan Alda’s
Southern mistress in the political satire The Seduction of Joe Tynan. “I
did that film on automatic pilot,” she later says. “I couldn’t have worked with
a more lovely, more understanding person than Alan Alda.”[21]April: In the NBC miniseries Holocaust, plays a well-to-do German
woman trying to save her Jewish husband James Woods from the Nazi concentration
camps. Meets sculptor Donald Gummer, brother Harry’s Yalie chum. September:
Marries Gummer. Wins an Emmy for Holocaust, but doesn’t pick it up,
telling Ms., “I don’t believe performances should be taken out of
context and put up against each other for awards.”[22]December:The Deer Hunter released; she will receive her first Oscar
nomination.

Appears in an April Vogue
People Are Talking About article, in a group shot by Annie Leibovitz. (Vogue
will run the photo again in 2007, in a Nostalgia column by writer John Burnham
Schwartz.) Wins her first Oscar, Best Supporting Actress, for Kramer vs.
Kramer. Accidentally leaves her statuette on the back of a toilet during
the festivities.

15. 1981

Stars opposite Jeremy Irons
in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, for which she will be nominated for
her third Academy Award. “When Meryl walked into the makeup room,” Irons will
recall in Vogue years later, “she walked in as my lover. And all day,
when we did the [love] scene, she created this little box of reality around us.
But that evening, when I went to dinner with her and Don . . . she had become
Meryl, mother, again.”[23]

16. 1982

November: Stars in Still of the Night as an icy Hitchcockian blonde. December:
The underrated thriller is quickly eclipsed in movie history by the release of Sophie’s
Choice, for which Streep will win her second Oscar in as many years. The
excruciating scene in which she must choose which of her two children to save
from the death camps was so painful for Streep that she refused to do more than
one take.

17. 1983

Silkwood is released, costarring Cher and Kurt Russell. In her fifth
Oscar-nominated role, she plays real-life whistle-blower Karen Silkwood. August:
Daughter Mary Willa Gummer is born (later known as the actress Mamie Gummer).

18. 1984

Reunites on-screen with
Robert De Niro in Falling in Love, which The New York Times
dismisses as “a classy weeper that poses a rude question: What are talented
people like Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, and Ulu Grosbard, their director,
doing in a sudsy movie like this?”[24]

19. 1985

In Plenty, plays a
fighter in the French Resistance. Out of Africa, costarring Robert
Redford, released. Based on Isak Dinesen’s account of building a plantation in
Kenya, the story was originally planned for Greta Garbo back in the day. Streep
almost didn’t get the part because director Sydney Pollack wanted someone
sexier (“For that well-known sexpot Isak Dinesen,” Streep will dryly explain
later.[25]) Despite
mixed reviews, the sprawling film wins seven Oscars, including Best Picture,
Best Director, and Best Cinematography. Streep is nominated for Best Actress,
but loses to Geraldine Page for The Trip to Bountiful.

20. 1986

May: Second daughter Grace Jane Gummer born. July:Heartburn,
costarring Jack Nicholson and directed by Mike Nichols, released. Despite its
tagline “Two Oscar-winning Stars Combine with an Oscar-winning Director,” the
film goes unrecognized by the Academy. Twenty-month-old Mamie appears in it,
her first acting role. (“You know,” Mamie later says, “I still get residuals
from Heartburn. A couple times a year I get a check for $80.”)[26]

21. 1987

In Ironweed, plays a
drinking buddy opposite washed-up baseball player Jack Nicholson. “Meryl
Streep, as ever, is uncanny,” reports The New York Times, “a stunning
impersonation of a darty-eyed, fast-talking woman of the streets, an angry,
obdurate woman with great memories and no future.”[27] Both
Streep and Nicholson nominated for Oscars.

22. 1988

Plays Lindy Chamberlain in A
Cry in the Dark (uttering the immortal line, “A dingo ate my baby!”) Of all
the accents Streep is famous for, she finds Aussie the hardest.

23. 1989

By this time, her success
in serious roles has become predictable—as Vogue will later say,
“Another accent, another Oscar nomination, so what else is new?”[28]June: Celebrates her fortieth birthday. “I remember turning to my husband
and saying, ‘Well, what should we do? Because it’s over,’ ”[29] she
later recounts to Vogue. The following year she will receive three
different offers to play witches. December: For a change of pace,
embarks on a series of comedies, a few of which will be considered her worst
films: She-Devil with Roseanne Barr, Carrie Fisher’s autobiographical Postcards
From the Edge (1990), and Death Becomes Her (1992).

24. 1990

Receives yet another Oscar
nomination, this time for Postcards from the Edge. It will be another
five years until she is nominated again (for Francesca, who finds forbidden
love with Clint Eastwood in The Bridges of Madison County).

25.
1991

Third daughter Louisa
Jacobson Gummer born. She also will become an actress. (Streep will later joke
of her kids, “I would love someone to be an astrophysicist or even just a vet.”[30])

26. 1992

Vogue profiles Streep, who is appearing in Death Becomes Her, a movie
about an aging actress who takes a youth potion. “Every girl deals with what
she looks like,” she says, “from the moment she discovers what that is in
comparison to everybody else—to women of beauty. It’s the only issue for
women, from age eleven until they, I guess, hit 50 and don’t give a damn
anymore. No, I wouldn’t say 50 now. It’s probably 60, right? Maybe more like
75. Maybe they never stop.”[31]

·27

Offered the title role in
the Alan Parker film Evita, but when production is delayed the part goes
to pop icon Madonna. Thrills
fans with her sturdy physique as a white water–rafter in the action flick The
River Wild, battling a raging river and armed robbers.

·28

Clint Eastwood—who later
calls her “the greatest actress in the world”—plays opposite Streep in The
Bridges of Madison County. “There was a big fight over how I was too old to
play the part,” she says, “even though Clint was nearly 20 years older than me.
The part was for a 45-year-old woman, and Clint said, ‘This is a 45-year-old
woman.’ ”[32]

·29

Stars in One True Thing
with Renée Zellweger. “We used to make up Scrabble words between takes, not all
of them appropriate for print,”[33] the
younger star tells Vogue (adding that she recently came across a high
school scrapbook page reserved for favorite actress, on which she had written
in sparkly marker, “Meryl Streep.”)[34]

·30

Plays a violin teacher in Music
of the Heart, after Madonna drops out citing creative differences with
director Wes Craven.

·32

Voices the character Blue
Mecha in Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi movie A.I. Regally sits at the center
of assembled silver-screen royalty on the gatefold cover of Vanity Fair’s
“Legends of Hollywood” Special Collector’s Edition. The epic Annie Leibovitz
shoot involved ten A-list actresses and three separate locations (London, New
York, and Los Angeles).

·32

“For an actress, worrying
about appearance is a horrible, horrible trap,” December Vogue quotes
her as saying. “It’s great for acting to be unconscious of how you look and to
be willing to mess up how you look, and see what that does to people.”[35] The
magazine features her two new releases, Adaptation and The Hours.
For Adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze, receives her thirteenth Academy
Award nod, breaking records held by Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn for most
nominations. Later jokingly comments, “I also hold the record for losing
more.”[36] (Early
in her career, Streep had received a letter from Davis, in which the legendary
star said she viewed her as her successor as the premier American actress.)

·33

January: Sandra Bullock jokes in Vogue, “The Academy shouldn’t even
nominate Meryl Streep anymore. She should just be given an award every year. .
. . The Meryl Streep Category.”[37]September: Streep celebrates her silver wedding anniversary. Despite the fact
that she often mentions her husband when she is interviewed, she once told Vogue,
“He hates to be written about in my movie stuff.”[38]

·34

April: Honored with the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award. Her legendary leading
men pay touching tribute. Silkwood’s Kurt Russell sums up her
unparalleled appeal. “The magnificent Mr. Nichols put it right about you,” he
says. “ ‘Anyone,’ he said, ‘who gets to know Meryl has to fall in love
with her.’ I said, ‘And if they don’t?’ ‘Well if they don’t, then
there’s something wrong with them.’ I just want you to know, Meryl,
there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me.”[39]July: She plays a memorably ruthless mother of vice-presidential
candidate Liev Schreiber in The Manchurian Candidate.

May: To promote A Prairie Home Companion, appears on the cover of W
with costar Lindsay Lohan in a mother-daughter portrait by Michael Thompson,
with an accompanying story and fashion portfolio entitled “Two Queens.” Tabloid
habituée Lohan had pitched the cover idea to the magazine herself, having
become enamored of Streep while playing her daughter in the Robert Altman film.
June:The Devil Wears Prada released. Streep will garner her
fourteenth Oscar nomination for it, and win Best Actress at the Golden Globes.
It is one of the most expensively costumed movies in history, due to the
innumerable looks from Chanel, Gucci, Givenchy, et al; in her Globes acceptance
speech the following January, Streep thanks costumer Patricia Field, “because that
was like ‘Special Effects’ for our movie.”[40] The
producers donate many of the clothes to charities including Equality Now,
Breast Cancer Research, and Dress for Success. Streep reportedly hangs onto her
Miranda Priestley sunglasses, which she will use again during the “Money Money
Money” sequence in Mamma Mia!

·37

“Will she wear Prada?” asks
The Los Angeles Times in the lead-up to the Seventy-ninth Academy
Awards. “All eyes will be on Streep’s Oscar style.”[41]The
Devil Wears Prada star walks the red carpet in a
dress given her personally by Miuccia Prada—although,
as Variety later notes, the general consensus is that it was a
“regrettable ensemble.”[42]

·38

July: Hits the multiplex as Donna, singing Abba hits, in the film version of
the Broadway smash Mamma Mia!December: Dons a nun’s habit—and
returns to Oscar-nomination territory—as scary Sister Aloysius Beauvier in Doubt.
The film is hailed as one of the year’s best.

·39

February: Wears off-the-shoulder Alberta Ferretti on the Academy Awards red carpet, to rave reviews. “It draws the eye up
to her face,” says Project Runway’s Tim Gunn, “which is stunning. . . .
But, boy, her fashion is back and forth like a yo-yo.”[43]August: Rejoins Nora Ephron (Silkwood and Heartburn), who
directs her in a joyful portrayal of Julia Child in Julie & Julia.
As the six-foot-two cooking legend, the five-foot-six Streep wears extra-high heels
and gains fifteen pounds. November: Lends her voice to Mrs. Felicity
Fox, opposite George Clooney as Mr. Fox, in Wes Anderson’s animated hit Fantastic
Mr. Fox. Stars in romantic comedy It’s Complicated, after which she
decides to take a break. “Sometimes if you give that much you have to settle it
down and let the field go fallow for one year, like the farmers do.”[44]

·40

January: Comedienne Tina Fey indulges in some Streep-worship in an episode of 30
Rock. “You can try to fight getting older,” warns Fey’s character, Liz
Lemon. “You can be like Madonna and cling to youth with your Gollum arms. Or
you can be like Meryl Streep, and embrace your age with elegance. Two paths.
Meryl Streep . . . or Madonna.”[45]February: Up for the sixteenth time for an Oscar, for Julie & Julia,
loses to Sandra Bullock in the November surprise The Blind Side. (“I
left her a voicemail going, ‘You’ve got to watch your back. I’m gonna take you
down,’ ” Bullock jokes. “She sent me dead orchids and told me to die.”)[46]

·41

The Iron Lady released; she receives New York Film Critics Circle Award for best
actress. Streep is on her way to challenging Katharine Hepburn’s record of four
Oscars.

·42

Streep appears on her first
Vogue cover in January. Describing her turn as the Iron Lady, director
Phyllida Lloyd tells Vicki Woods, “It’s not an impersonation on any level. It’s
an incarnation.”[47]

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The main idea of this Blog is spread the habit of reading. Literature is part of our lives. When enter in the Literature world, we read better and we improve our though and imagination.I want, with this, divide a little of my dreams. Is to give opportunity to people read and know about works produced by ancient and contemporary writers, and mainly, myself to be insert in this wonderful world of the Letters.